Paper never goes out of style

The Central Election Commission (CEC) has begun organizing the 2024 presidential campaign in earnest: on Wednesday, the commission approved the number of ballots for the elections and financial reporting forms for candidates, and also recognized the need to form a special election commission to work with polling stations abroad. At the same time, the number of such polling stations may be greatly reduced, warned the deputy chairman of the Central Election Commission, Nikolai Bulaev, and this, of course, will make it difficult for Russians living abroad to participate in the elections. Moreover, they will not be able to use remote electronic voting (DEG).

For the presidential elections, 113,574,550 ballots will be printed, of which 112.68 million will be intended for polling stations in Russia, 886 thousand for foreign ones and separately 11.7 thousand for the city of Baikonur. The Central Election Commission made this decision at a meeting on November 8. Let us remind you that according to the law, voting must take place on March 17, 2024, and the Federation Council will officially set the election date in mid-December 2023, after which the nomination of candidates will begin.

The circulation of ballots is calculated based on data on the number of voters as of July 1, 2023 (109.9 million people), said Central Election Commission member Konstantin Mazurevsky. Since this list does not include four new regions, to take them into account, we used data from the protocols of the elections held there in September: we are talking about 2 million voters in the DPR, 1.7 million in the LPR and, accordingly, 684 thousand and 496 thousand in Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. Also taken into account were requests from the election commissions of Chechnya, the Amur Region, the Nenets and Chukotka Autonomous Okrug to increase the circulation of ballots (within the limits of 1.5% authorized by law). In Chechnya, the need for additional ballots was explained by the large number of young people who received the right to vote in recent months, while other regions refer to the presence of rotation workers.

CEC member Nikolai Levichev proposed to provide for the possibility of adjusting the number of ballots depending on the circumstances. Thus, it is planned to send 13,950 ballots to the UK, although, for example, only 2,348 people participated in the vote on amendments to the Constitution in 2020, he recalled. Employees of diplomatic missions then have to destroy most of the expensive circulation, but money could be saved and spent on special equipment for voting by disabled people, Mr. Levichev lamented. Or is it planned to produce 7.5 million ballots for Moscow, but perhaps it should be taken into account how many voters in the capital will vote online, a member of the Central Election Commission wondered.

But my colleagues did not support such an initiative. The law requires that the number of ballots correspond to the number of voters, Nikolai Bulaev recalled. An application from Moscow to use DEG has indeed already been received by the Central Election Commission and will be considered, but this will not affect the circulation of ballots, he explained. “It’s probably possible to proceed from the expected development of events, but this is a dangerous matter,” warned the deputy chairman of the Central Election Commission. “If we don’t give a large number of ballots, and the turnout is quite high, then, of course, this will cause great tension at the polling stations.”

Perhaps, when the process of applying the DEG becomes “reliable and irreversible,” changes can be made to the legislation, but for now the situation of a shortage of ballots is completely unacceptable, CEC Chairperson Ella Pamfilova supported her deputy: “To London – yes, a lot of them have come there now… they’ve left in large numbers, I would say so. Regardless of how we treat them, no one is depriving them of the right to vote, and we must keep this in mind too. The main thing is that the Anglo-Saxons do not limit their rights, and we are in no way going to limit them.”

Meanwhile, it is already clear that the number of polling stations abroad will be greatly reduced: the Central Election Commission explains this by the serious opposition that election organizers encounter in “unfriendly countries.” In such conditions, the commission emphasizes, the role of the foreign territorial election commission, the decision to create which the Central Election Commission made on Wednesday, becomes especially important: this body will take over the management of foreign polling stations. For example, in Germany, where, according to the latest data, there are about 500 thousand Russians, the number of plots will be reduced by at least half, said Nikolai Bulaev. According to him, all year the CEC together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have been searching for solutions, including at the legislative level, that would allow organizing voting in full. The situation is aggravated by the fact that Russians abroad will not be able to use DEG – such a decision, as previously explained by the Central Election Commission, was made to ensure the security of the system.

Anastasia Kornya